Month: April 2017

As I’ve been learning Blender and the art of 3d Modeling (and by extension, animation using the models I’m building), some have wondered what (if anything) the master plan is.  I have to admit that I don’t really have a really good answer for that.  I originally started out with the goal of learning how to create an animate a small character or object that I could insert into my more traditional videos.

However, I think I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole!  Every time I learn something new in Blender, the possibilities of what can be built/done with these tools stretch out a little further – and all of these other, bigger ideas come flooding into my head.

Without really giving anything away, here’s a render of an model that I roughed together later in the day yesterday…

I still have to work out some of the hair details to become more efficient (the render times on this frame with “particle hair” added and the samples turned up to 512 was around 8 minutes).  I have a few ideas of how to speed up my renders but have to learn a bit more yet…   But it’s a start.

I also was working on this model the other day.  It started out as a picture of a pinching beetle that had landed on my RV window while I was at the Holloway Bar Place Mine and turned into this:

I rendered this out to a transparent background – and even rendered a 250 frame animation to try out a few things, but haven’t figured out how to render a short video in Vegas with a transparent background rather than my usual compositing methods, so I have to learn a bit more about the video editing end of things.  It’s actually pretty amazing to think that this stuff can be cranked out in the basement rather than some big animation studio!  This is an interesting time to be learning all of this stuff…

I also built this “island in the sky” that I call “floater”.  Not sure how this ties into my big ideas but it was a fun exercise.

Every time I do one of these, I learn something!  That’s what it’s all about…